Dumas Malone

Dumas Malone (born January 10, 1892 in Coldwater , Mississippi ; died December 27, 1986 in Charlottesville , Virginia ) was an American historian . He is particularly known for his six-volume biography Thomas Jeffersons ( Thomas Jefferson and His Time , published 1948–1981), which is still considered a standard work today.

Life

Malone, son of Methodist cleric John W. Malone and teacher Lillian Kemp Malone, grew up in Coldwater, Mississippi and Cuthbert , Georgia. The philologist Kemp Malone was his older brother. He enrolled at Emory College at the age of fourteen . After his AB in 1910, he worked as a teacher, but at the same time was preparing for a career as a pastor before. In 1916 he received a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Yale University . When the United States in 1917 in the First World War intervened, he joined the US Marine Corps , where he served two years and up to the rank of second lieutenant ( lieutenant ) rose. After the end of his service, he returned to Yale for graduate studies, where he now specialized in history. Allen Johnson supervised his theses at Yale ( AM 1921, Ph.D. 1923) . His doctoral thesis, a biography of the Republican politician and college professor Thomas Cooper (1759-1839) was awarded the University's John Addison Porter Prize and published as a book by Yale University Press . After this first publication, Malone moved as a lecturer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, with whom he stayed with interruptions until the end of his life. In 1925 he married Elisabeth Gifford; the marriage resulted in two children.

In 1929 he stopped teaching and accepted an invitation from his doctoral supervisor, Allen Johnson, to help him as editor of the twenty-volume Dictionary of American Biography , the forerunner of the American National Biography . After Johnson's accidental death in 1931, Malone was the editor in charge of the project; He wrote seventeen of the 13,633 biographies contained therein, especially his contribution on Thomas Jefferson should be emphasized. After completing the last volume, he moved to Harvard University Press in 1936 as chairman of the editorial board , where he drove the expansion of the relatively small university publisher, which mainly published its own dissertations, to one of the largest academic publishers in the USA.

In 1943 he separated from the HUP in a dispute and returned to Charlottesville to begin his magnum opus Jefferson and His Time . Allen Johnson had suggested a comprehensive biography of Jefferson years earlier. Working on this biography occupied Malone for a good 40 years until it was completed in 1981. During this time, Malone, who had always been very interested in teaching and university policy, returned to the university: 1945–1959 taught in New York at Columbia University , and from 1953–1959 he was also editor of the Political Science Quarterly . In 1959 he returned to the University of Virginia when the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation established him an endowed professorship. He retired in 1962, but the Foundation created him a position as Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation biographer-in-residence to help him work on his Jefferson biography. The last volume, published in 1981, was written by Malone with considerable health problems: he became increasingly blind, so that his assistants read him archival material. The biography has enjoyed some popularity with the reading public since the first volume was published and also earned it the recognition of the historians' guild. Malone received numerous awards for his work, including the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for History for the fifth volume, Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805-1809 . In 1983 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan for his life's work .

In 1936 Malone was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

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Jefferson and His Time is an achievement in the field of biography that has hardly been surpassed in its wealth of detail . Malone struggled to portray Jefferson in the context of his time and was cautious about interpretations and value judgments. On the other hand, his work contributed significantly to the canonization of Jefferson as the epitome of the American democrat, which, in view of the threat from the totalitarian systems first of National Socialist Germany and then of the Soviet Union, also had a current political dimension, especially in the middle of the 20th century. In 1933 Malone intervened with an essay titled Jefferson and the New Deal in the current political debate about the New Deal and explained why Franklin D. Roosevelt's economic policy was completely filled with the spirit of Jefferson, the "prophet of democracy"; The complicity of Harding and Coolidge with the " financial oligarchy " that caused the economic crisis, however, he saw in the political tradition of Jefferson's federalist rival Alexander Hamilton ; its elitist disdain for the common people, applied to the present day, led today "directly to fascism." With these claims, Malone joined a number of progressivist intellectuals who at that time appropriated Jefferson for their political goals; Worth mentioning here is Claude G. Bowers , who went so far in his books to declare Jefferson the founder of today's Democratic Party . In the Jefferson jubilee year 1943 (in which the Jefferson Memorial was inaugurated), Malone also published a fictional letter from Jefferson to the incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Virginia Quarterly Review , in which he had the founding father urgently conjure up the need for dignity and to defend freedom of the individual, also and especially in the ongoing war.

With the emphasis on the liberal conception of Jefferson's society, Malone, together with other historians specializing in this period such as Fiske and Marie Kimball, Adrienne Koch and Nathan Schachner , ushered in a turning point in the appreciation of Jefferson in historiography. Previously, Henry Adams ' nine-volume History of the United States of America During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson (1889-91) had shaped the image of his presidency, which Adams was described quite disillusioned as a never-ending sequence of petty intrigues, shaped more by vain of selfishness as of noble republican ideals. For Malone, however, Jefferson was above all an enlightened liberal: "Freedom was his most important concern, especially freedom of the mind", as Malone wrote in the foreword to the first volume. Jefferson, like every mortal, had more profane motives, but he stood out among the statesmen of his time because he had not lost sight of "his declared goal: freedom and happiness of man" and always formed his judgment with regard to this ideal have.

Although Malone was often accused in reviews of being overly taken with Jefferson (especially in his portrayal of the republican - federalist antagonism in Volume III), the thoroughness of his research is generally recognized. Younger Jefferson biographers have criticized and attempted to correct Malone's priorities, in particular his comparatively casual examination of Jefferson's involvement in Virginia's slavery system. In the meantime, at least in one decisive case, it is certain that Malone's picture of Jefferson without blame and blame does not correspond to the facts, namely in the controversy that has been going on since Jefferson's lifetime as to whether Jefferson had a sexual relationship with his slave Sally Hemings , which was confirmed in 1996 by genetic analyzes Hemings' offspring could be proven. Malone had examined this question in the fourth volume of his biography in a detailed appendix and finally, citing Jefferson's firmness of character, declared that the rumors could hardly be true.

literature

Works (selection)

• The Public Life of Thomas Cooper, 1783-1839 . Yale University Press, New Haven 1926; Oxford University Press, London 1926.
• (as editor): Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Pierre Samuel Du Pont De Nemours, 1789-1817 . Houghton Mifflin, Boston and New York 1930.
• Saints in action . Abingdon Press, New York 1939.
• Edwin A. Alderman: A Biography . Doubleday, Doran, New York 1940.
• Jefferson and His Time . 6 volumes. Little, Brown, Boston 1948–1981:
  • Volume I: Jefferson The Virginian . 1948.
  • Volume II: Jefferson and the Rights of Man . 1951.
  • Volume III: Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty . 1962.
  • Volume IV: Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805 . 1970.
  • Volume V: Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805-1809 . 1974.
  • Volume VI: The Sage of Monticello . 1981.
• The Story of the Declaration of Independence . Oxford University Press, New York and London 1954.
• with Basil Rauch: Empire for Liberty: The Genesis and Growth of the United States of America . Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York 1960.
• Thomas Jefferson as Political Leader . University of California Press, Berkeley 1963; Cambridge University Press, London 1963.

Secondary literature

• Paul A. Horne, Jr .: Dumas Malone . In: Dictionary of Literary Biography . Volume 17. Gale Research Co., Detroit 1983, pp. 250-257.
• O. Allen Gianniny: Malone, Dumas . In: American National Biography Online , February 2000.
• Merrill D. Peterson: Dumas Malone: ​​the Completion of A Monument . In: The Virginia Quarterly Review , Volume 58, Issue 1, pp. 26-31.
• Merrill D. Peterson: Dumas Malone: ​​An Appreciation . In: The William and Mary Quarterly . Third Series , Vol. 45, No. 2, 1988, pp. 237-252.
• Frank Shuffelton: Being Definitive: Jefferson Biography Under The Shadow of Dumas Malone . In: Biography Volume 18, Issue 4, 1995. pp. 291-304.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1900-1949 ( PDF ). Retrieved September 27, 2015
2. ↑ Horne, Dumas Malone . P. 251.
3. ↑ Dumas Malone: Jefferson and the New Deal . In: Scribner's Magazine 93, pp. 356-359.
4. ↑ Dumas Malone: Mr. Jefferson to Mr. Roosevelt ( Memento of the original of December 29, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In The Virginia Quarterly Review , Volume 19, pp. 161-77.  
5. ^ "Liberty was his chief concern and his major emphasis was on the freedom of the spirit and the mind." In: Jefferson The Virginian , p. Xiv.
6. ^ "Like other men of state he had secondary objectives, but he rarely if ever lost sight of his clear-purposed goal of human freedom and happiness or failed to reach his important judgments in the light of it. Among the statesmen of his time he was most notable for his high purposefulness and it would be a grave fault in a biographer to minimize it. "In: Jefferson And The Rights Of Man , S. xvi.
7. ↑ See for example Clay S. Jenkinson: The Ordeal of Thomas Jefferson: Whirl Is King . In: Oregon Historical Quarterly , Fall 2004 ( Online  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ): "[...] the Herculean efforts of Jefferson's protectors - especially Dumas Malone, the author of the six-volume definitive biography of Jefferson - have been so imbalanced, so unwilling to face the Jefferson problem, that they have brought on the severe reaction that has recently set in. In a sense, recent scholarship about Jefferson has been as much a reaction to Malone's hagiography as it has been about Jefferson himself. "  
8. ↑ On Malone's role in the Hemings controversy, see: Annette Gordon-Reed: Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy . University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville 1998. pp. 46ff and passim.